SEO VS SEM

How can you boost your website to get more traffic, leads, and sales?
We’ll walk you through everything you need to know about search engine marketing, what are SEO & SEM, what is the difference between them, and more…

SEO VS SEM

Search Engines play a major role in setting the visibility, traffic, and accessibility of any website, especially with the rapid increase of competition on the digital platforms between worldwide competitors presenting similar market offerings.

Your business may provide the best market offerings, while on the other hand, the numbers of sales and leads are not compatible with these market offerings, as a result of a poor or a slow Search Engine strategy.

The two most known tools to increase the visibility of your website are the “SEO” and “SEM”.

You could say they’re two sides of the same coin, they may have the same goal, however, they don’t work the same way.

What are SEO and SEM?

SEO is short for “Search Engine Optimization”, while SEM is short for “Search Engine Marketing”, but what does each of these concepts mean?

Google’s search results are divided into two main categories: the paid search results and the organic search results, in short, the paid search results represent the SEM, and the organic search results represent the SEO;
But does this mean that depending on the SEO is cheaper? And does depend on the SEM grant the best results?

Is SEO cheaper than SEM?

A well-planned SEO strategy will make your website appear at the top of the search results, for free, but it costs a big capital at the beginning.

The SEO strategy depends on assigning the right keywords to ease the accessibility of your target audience to your website, it may seem easy but it requires a lot of time to see the primary results, as you will need to constantly create high-quality content and to hire an SEO Expert to help with the SEO process and plenty of waiting and believing in the process.

Although it takes bigger efforts (especially in high competition industries), the results are incomparably better in the long-term.

But, should you delay your traffic until the SEO results start to flourish?

Why do you need SEM?

That’s when the SEM strategy pays, some may simply summarize the SEM strategy as a PPC -Pay Per Click- marketing. Google Ads or as it was previously known (Google Adwords) is one of the most commonly used search provider for this strategy, it places your website at the top of the search page (not the top of the search results) as a paid advertisement.

It provides a boost to your website traffic -as long as you pay for the advertisement to be displayed, and raises awareness about your brand, and builds a primary fan base before the SEO results kick-in.

How to balance between SEO and SEM?

However, SEM will provide faster results, but it’s not recommended to rely on it all the time.

It may require a bigger investment and longer time in the beginning to create a solid SEO strategy but by the time it will cost less and provide better, more credible, and trusted results.

You could achieve the best results by mixing the SEO and the SEM strategies, by kick-starting with the SEM to gain brand recognition while working on the SEO in parallel to verify your brand, expand your fanbase, and have sustainable traffic in the long term.

And Finally

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